This photo of Paddy was taken in 1946 by Joan Eyres-Monsell, whom he later married. It’s my favourite photo of him. At this point he has never published a book and has little more than the clothes on his back, and yet the joy and confidence just pour off him.

If you are coming to the end of a celebrated life, chances are thats someone has already suggested writing your biography – a thought, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, that lends a new terror to death. The print run will be measured in thousands, and modern readers feel shortchanged unless all is revealed: sex, money, secrets, skeletons and dirty linen. The… Read more

For afficionados of Patrick Leigh Fermor, this website has everything: patrickleighfermor.wordpress.com/…/welcome-to-the-patrick-leigh-ferm… I never walked a step of Paddy’s Great Trudge from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. To me those books are about a timeless Europe suspended somewhere between memory and imagination, and I didn’t want to mess up the pictures that his writing had created in my head. But Nick… Read more